The afternoon before Thanksgiving, we lost our internet connection when a tree fell on the fiber optic cable. Naturally, they can’t get a tech out here to fix it until Monday. We actually can live without internet for a few days. Really. We can. I’m just sure of it. The problem is that our phones don’t work without it, which is a pretty big safety issue. My email server is also disconnected which, if it goes on long enough, can cause a lot of problems with banks and credit card companies when emails to me bounce. So it’s not just about being able to stream television and scroll on Mastodon… we need internet. See?
Anyway, I had planned for this eventuality. I have had a Starlink earth station, deactivated, for years. I do test it occasionally to make sure I can get an internet connection, so I knew it worked. What I hadn’t ever done is connect it via Ethernet to my existing network. So I got the Starlink (gen 2 for those who care) working meaning we could use our phones when near enough to access the Starlink WiFi. What didn’t happen is that my mail server was still disconnected, and the extended WiFi that lets us use our phone from the garage or driveway or pasture or barn or studio didn’t work.
Aside: regular readers will recall that I have been avoiding cloud-based products for running the house. Had I not done so, losing the internet would have meant losing access to the solar inverter and all the load management algorithms I had created. I would also have lost access to the security cameras I have around. Because all that stuff was offline, I could happily still manage the solar plant and how it runs the house. My control center continued to function.
There were two exceptions:
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The temperature sensors for the freezer and hot tub went offline. It took some digging, but I discovered that when I had set up the Ecowitt temperature monitoring device, I had pointed it to the public internet address of my Home Assistant server. No internet, no access to that public IP. It was simple to reconfigure the Ecowitt device to use my local IP address.
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Joulee the Free Salvage Tesla was another issue. She’s a 2015 Model S and, as far as I know, Tesla makes no provision for accessing the car’s charging system except to go through Tesla’s cloud-hosted API. I don’t like this, as the experience has become worse and worse over time (it is much slower than when I first bought the car, and commands often fail). Alas, there wasn’t anything that I could do, but I think I may have found a way to connect to the car’s CAN bus directly via Bluetooth. That’s certainly possible with newer Teslas, but it’s a work-in-progress for older models. I have acquired the hardware and it only remains to be seen if access to the CAN bus will be enough to let me control charging directly and bypass the Tesla APIs.
So I very much wanted to get my existing wired network connected through Starlink. That was why I bought the Ethernet adapter all those years ago when I first tried Starlink. Alas, the adapter had become separated from the rest of the earth station, and I could not find it. I got up early Thanksgiving morning to search through boxes for it, as it had somehow gotten boxed without being entered into my box inventory database. I didn’t find it until later in the morning. I had never used it (the box was still sealed) and when I connected it, it didn’t seem to work at all. It even killed the Starlink WiFi upon which we had been relying.
I would like to have done some troubleshooting, but HA and I had been invited to a progressive dinner with a few of our neighbors, which we were anchoring with dessert. The pies had to be done before I left for the appetizer phase of the meal at 1:00pm. I was running out of time, so I left the internet project and focused on baking.
The progressive dinner was a lot of fun. Here’s one of our neighbor’s tables set for the soup course:
We finished around 8:00pm after seven hours of eating, drinking, gaming, and visiting. I was in no shape to resume network troubleshooting.
The next morning, I attacked the problem again and immediately noticed that the Starlink dish connector on the Ethernet adapter wasn’t quite completely seated. It’s a SpaceX device, and they usually go for tight tolerances so a connector sticking a millimeter our from its socket didn’t seem right. Getting it properly seated took several tries (I suspect a metal housing was very slightly bent), but once seated I was able to plug in the Starlink Ethernet into the router port where the fiber interface was formerly docked.
Two amazing things were going on: the first was that internet protocols have become so self-configuring that I didn’t have to dig around to find IP addresses, subnet masks, gateways, DNS address, MTU lengths, and all the other minutiae it used to take to get an interface connection configured. The other was that HawaiianTel hadn’t done any silly messing with the standard protocols (such messing seems to be an irresistible temptation to most ISPs) so that unplugging the fiber and plugging in the Starlink dish simply worked with ZERO additional configuration.
So at the end of the day, switching to backup internet would have worked painlessly if only I had done a test run so I (1) knew where the adapter was and (2) knew how to properly seat the connector. In the future, I’ll be able to set it up in minutes even if the whole satellite system is stowed in a box in the garage.
So I ended the day thankful for the amazing technology that allows me to have all these great and functional toys, and keeps them functional even when systems fail. I am thankful for the endlessly patient and supportive HA. And I am thankful for our fabulous neighbors who have made us so welcome in our new neighborhood.
—2p